Analysis of Music Video and Genre - 'What Makes You Beautiful'

The first music video I have chosen to analyse is ‘That’s What Makes you Beautiful’ which coincided with the release of the global boy band’s debut single in 2011. The aim of this video essentially is to create a very clear and defined ‘star image’ that is exploited to entice the bands target demographic. This is an image of five very clean cut, young men who make up their time with charming and appropriate fun. This image plays to the ’13 year-old girl’ audience, and creates content that the parents of that demographic are happy for their audience to be interested in. In some of their more recent videos it has become notably evident that the band are being displayed in a different way from this. The members have become considerably less refined with the majority having tattoos and facial hair and participating in slightly more reckless activities. This is a purposeful position as the bands marketing team wish for them to grow similarly to their original fan base. This means that as their fan base grows older they won’t lose interest.

The video has a partial narrative with the boys meeting up with a small group of girls of the same age to have a camping and sharing a good time. This is of course extremely basic but is all that is required to secure the image. The scenes take place on a beach with the water crashing against the rocks. Considering the romantic nature of the video, one could argue that this setting has strong contextual links with the opening scene of Musical/Movie Grease (1978) which is iconic had a similar target audience. It makes the video somewhat cliché but ensures that the image and intention is immediately identifiable and there is nothing at all sinister about the group. This is reinforced by the slightly dated editing technique of cross-fading between cuts which has a strong romantic resonance. Close-up shots between band members and girls are used to establish chemistry and allow us to see both facial expressions clearly.  Aside from the narrative, there is also a performance element to the video with the band seen to be lip-syncing the words. This may be an attempt to reinforce that fact that they are actually performers and not simply ‘pretty faces’. They also dance and make gestical movements to coincide with the music and maintain the enjoyable pace of the light-hearted video.